British Lawmakers Join Fray as Twitter Tests Law

SARAH LYALL

Tuesday

May 24, 2011 at 4:20 AM

Lawmakers may adjust a privacy injunction after Twitter’s gleeful circumvention of a ruling.

LONDON — After he cleverly obtained a court ruling forbidding the news media from reporting on his possible affair with a “Big Brother” contestant, the Manchester United soccer player Ryan Giggs must have thought he had avoided a whole lot of trouble.

The tough ruling banned anyone from reporting his name, her name in connection with Mr. Giggs, the supposed affair, even the very existence of the order itself. But anonymity would prove an elusive goal for He Who Shall Not Be Named, as some called the unfortunate Mr. Giggs, who had not reckoned on the wicked anarchy of Twitter.

The clash between old-media law and new-media reality soon descended into a chaotic farce, with Mr. Giggs’s name appearing in some 75,000 postings over the weekend, even as British news organizations were still legally forbidden to print it.

In the House of Commons, John Whittingdale, a Conservative member of Parliament, said that “you would virtually have to be living in an igloo” not to know what was going on, and that the use of Twitter was “in danger of making the law look an ass.”

The showdown has been brewing for weeks, since Britain’s newspapers began reporting on the proliferation of so-called super-injunctions like the one given to Mr. Giggs — court orders forbidding news outlets from reporting even that they cannot report something.

Typically, requests for such orders are made by public figures eager to halt the spread of tabloid-fodder stories about affairs, romps with prostitutes and the like. They have also been obtained by companies hoping to hush up damaging accusations.

Once they win the super-injunctions, the parties are then generally identified by random initials that have nothing to do with their real names.

Since news of the existence of super-injunctions began filtering out in 2009, there has been a stampede on social media sites to identify the people behind them.

The latest incident began, really, last Friday, when a Twitter user identified Mr. Giggs as the man seeking to hide accusations of an extramarital affair with Imogen Thomas, a beauty pageant winner who had once appeared on “Big Brother.”

The first post set off an avalanche of further tweets and retweets, in the form of information dissemination as well as jokes at Mr. Giggs’s expense.

Mr. Giggs was subsequently identified so many times on Twitter — 75,000, according to John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat member of Parliament — that he became a worldwide trending topic. On Friday, Mr. Giggs’s lawyers said they planned to sue Twitter to find the people behind the initial posts.

Meanwhile, newspapers were still forbidden to print his name. They did not identify him when fans from the opposing team at a soccer match on Saturday made up lewd Giggs-related chants. Nor did they identify him in Monday morning’s papers, even though The Sunday Herald in Glasgow, claiming that the law did not apply in Scotland, printed his photograph on the front page with his eyes obscured.

“Frankly, I don’t care if Ryan Giggs had an affair or not, but I absolutely care that I can’t tell my readers something that they can find out in two seconds by switching on a computer,” said Richard Walker, the paper’s editor.

By Monday, things had reached a fever pitch. Speaking in a television interview, Prime Minister David Cameron said that he knew the man’s name “like everybody else” and that the law on super-injunctions might need to be revisited. A curious aspect of British law is that legislators are allowed to say whatever they want in Parliament, within reason, without being sued for libel. By the same token, the news media can report the legislators’ remarks.

So when Mr. Hemming rose and uttered the fatal words (“Ryan Giggs”) in the House of Commons on Monday, that seemed to invite the news media, finally, to print his name. Which they duly did on their Web sites.

The Sun then went to the High Court, asking it to lift the injunction on the grounds that there seemed to be few people left who did not know Mr. Giggs was the man in question.

But Justice Michael Tugendhat turned The Sun down, saying the Twitter campaign had actually demonstrated the need for the injunction.

“The fact that tens of thousands of people have named the claimant on the Internet confirms the fact that the claimant and his family need protection from intrusion into their private and family life,” the judge said.

But Mr. Walker of The Sunday Herald said it was too late for all that.

“You can’t imagine a worse outcome for him,” he said, speaking of Mr. Giggs. “Not only is he accused of sexual misadventure, but he’s become the antihero of the Twitter generation.”

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